IV
Whence comes this sudden change from the dilettante book, “Constance Ring,” with its Björnson-like reflections, to the matured style of “Sjur Gabriel” and “Two Friends”?
I could not understand it all at first, but the day came when I understood. Amalie Skram as a woman and an author had come on to the sunny side.
I have often wondered why it is that so few people come on to the sunny side. I have studied life until I became the avowed enemy of all superficial pessimism and superficial naturalism. I have discovered a secret attraction between happiness and individualism,—an attraction deeper than Zola is able to apprehend; it is the complete human beings who, with wide-opened tentacles, are able to appropriate to their own use everything that their inmost being has need of; but whether a person is or is not a complete human being, that fate decides for them before they are born.
Fru Amalie Skram was, in her way, one of these complete women. She passed unscathed through a girl’s education, was perhaps scarcely influenced by it, and with sparkling eyes and glowing cheeks she gazed upon the world and society with the look of a barbaric Northern woman, who retains the full use of her instinct. When quite young she married the captain of a ship, by whom she had two sons. She went with him on a long sea voyage round the world; she saw the Black Sea, the Sea of Azof, and the shores of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. She saw life on board ship, and life on land,—man’s life. Her mind was like a photographic plate that preserves the impressions received until they are needed; and when she reproduced them, they were as fresh and complete as at the moment when they were first taken. These impressions were not the smallware of a lady’s drawing-room; they represented the wide horizon, the rough ocean of life with its many dangers. It was the kind of life that brings with it freedom from all prejudice, the kind of life which is no longer found on board a modern steamer going to and fro between certain places at certain intervals.
But it was not to be expected that the monotony of the life could satisfy her. She separated herself from her husband, and remained on shore, where she became interested in various social problems, and wrote “Constance Ring.”
It was then that she made the acquaintance of Erik Skram.
The man with the head of Gustavus Adolphus is Denmark’s most Danish critic. His name is little known elsewhere, and he cannot be said to have a very great reputation; but this may be partly accounted for by the fact that he has no ambition, and partly because he has one of those profound natures that are rendered passive by the depth of their intellect. He is a man of one book, a novel called “Gertrude Colbjörnson,” and he is never likely to write another. But he contributes to newspapers and periodicals, where his spontaneous talent is accompanied by that quiet, delicate, easy-going style which is one of the forms of expression peculiar to the Danish sceptics.
Fru Amalie Müller became Fru Amalie Skram, and the bold Bergen woman, who was likewise the dissatisfied lady reformer of Christiania, became the wife of a born critic, and went to live at Copenhagen. She was an excitable little brunette, he a fair, phlegmatic man, and together they entered upon the struggle for the mastery, which marriage always is.
In this struggle Fru Amalie Skram was beaten; every year she became more of an artist, more natural, more simple, more herself, and more of all that a woman never can become when she is left to herself. Her husband’s superior culture liberated her fresh, wild, primitive nature from the parasites of social problems; the experienced critic saw that her strength lay in her keen observation, her happy incapacity for reasoning and moralizing, her infallible memory for the impressions of the senses and emotions, and her good spirits, which are nothing more than the result of physical health. He cautiously pushed her into the direction to which she is best suited, to the naturalism which is natural to her. Her books were no longer drawn out, neither were they as poor in substance as books by women generally are, even the best of them; they grew to be more laconic than the majority of men’s books, but clear and vivid; there was nothing in them to betray the woman. And after he had done this much for her, the experienced man did yet one thing more,—he gave her the courage of her recollections.